gsk
I tend to think of the Switch as having more home-console-scale experiences, too. The DS felt more like it’s own thing, and looking back at the library you can really see how the design of the console, its technical constraints, and the overall “vibe” of the thing informed the design of the games people made for it. The Switch doesn’t feel quite as conducive to quick, simple experiences and stuff you play in short bursts over a long period of time. Stuff like Picross, Sujin Taisen, Clubhouse Games, those sorts of polished-but-not-too-heavy things.
Karasu
There were a couple of weirdo peripherals like that on the DS. The only one I remember having at the time was the Guitar Hero controller, but I remember seeing the slide controller on import sites a lot:
I believe it only worked with the one game, but it was a first party one. Surprised it doesn’t come up more. Kind of an expensive one to import, though.
treefroggy
I’ve been kind of tempted to pick up a handful of them at once just to keep around. I don’t really find playing DS games on the 3DS to be totally satisfactory (and to be honest don’t like the hardware much in general), but it seems inevitable that they’re going to end up being more expensive soon. Particularly good condition ones, because so so so many DSs were put through a lot of abuse.
Kite006
Seeing a lot of people mentioning the Tingle games so I just wanted to throw out there that Chibi-Robo, one of the best games from the Love-De-Lic spinoffs, also had a little known and unlocalized DS sequel. Well, a couple of sequels that were translated and didn’t do well, followed by a real sequel that went totally untranslated. There’s a fantastic translation for it called Chibi Robo Clean Sweep. There’s a nice video covering it: